Let me tell you about my trouble with girls in the lab

Male and female brains are wired differently for pain.
by T. J. Nelson

science notes

by T. J. Nelson

No, they don't stand on chairs screaming when one of us gets out of our cage.
Not anymore. Female humans don't make distress calls like they used to. But
male and female brains do have many innate differences, not
just in math and spatial processing, but also
in connectivity. This week we learned something really earth-shattering: the
wiring for pain in male and females is different. At least for us mice.

Top: Minocycline, Bottom: Tetracycline

To understand this result, it's necessary to understand what we mouse researchers
did before.

We've known for a long time that the VTA (ventral tegmental area), a group of
dopamine-secreting neurons in the midbrain, is involved in the reward circuitry
of the brain. Dopamine acts as an analgesic signal and as the reward signal in the
VTA. That means dopamine is involved in sexual orgasm and motivation, but also
addiction and chronic pain. The VTA is next to the substantia nigra, which
is another set of dopaminergic neurons, that is affected in Parkinson's disease.

Antibiotics that can cross the blood-brain barrier and get into the brain, such
as minocycline, inhibit microglial cells. So Taylor et al. [1] used
minocycline to probe the biochemical mechanism. They found:

Chronic pain decreases the amount of dopamine (reward signal) released from the
VTA, while opioids (like morphine) and cocaine increase it.

Chronic pain interferes with morphine's ability to affect the reward signal,
but does not interfere with its ability to block nociception (pain signals).

Activating microglia blocks the release of dopamine.

Inhibiting microglia with minocycline restores the dopamine signal.

The conclusion is that chronic pain is mediated by loss of dopamine
release in the VTA. This is apparently caused by activation of microglia.

This is big.
Microglia are the ‘immune cells’ of the brain. Their purpose is to
clean up debris in the brain. They mediate chronic inflammation, which occurs in
Alzheimer's disease. They also chew up and destroy synapses that are injured.

(It's necessary to add that these mice weren't suffering in this experiment.
In fact, with all the drugs they were given, they were probably pretty happy
about the whole thing.)

These microglia also produce a lot of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor),
which causes neurons to grow and form new synapses. It's involved in learning,
and it's a very important protein in the brain. But it turns out that
BDNF also strengthens the neural
circuits that block the dopamine reward signal.

Synapses are good, because they're needed for memory. But too many synapses can
be as bad as too few. In some forms of autism, a disease that affects males 2−3
times more than females, there are defects in synaptic maturation. In others, there
are too many synapses. Microglia are suspected here [2]. Some researchers also suspect
that in Rett syndrome, a rare genetic form of autism that affects only girls, may also
be related to suppression of microglial neuroinflammation [3]. We're only starting to
understand the important role played by the brain's immune system.

Normally, activating microglia only produces a mild anti-inflammatory response,
called M2 activation. But when sufficiently provoked, microglia can turn nasty.
In their pro-inflammatory response, called M1 activation, they produce reactive
oxygen species (such as superoxide radicals), NOS (an enzyme that produces the gas
nitric oxide), and inflammatory cytokines that can kill bacteria and even neurons.
So we need to keep an eye on those microglia.

Humans in the mist

Now a bunch of Canadian and American researchers, publishing in Nature Neuroscience
[4], have blown all that out of the water. Female mice don't use microglia at all
for chronic pain hypersensitivity (called allodynia). They use T lymphocytes instead.

Sorge et al. discovered that minocycline, the microglia inhibitor, doesn't do a
darn thing in female mice. Since this is a negative finding, most of their short
article is devoted to making sure nothing went wrong. They tried other
ways of getting rid of microglia. Same result. They created a transgenic strain
with no BDNF in the microglia. It wiped out the allodynia in males, but not in the
females. Yet the amount of allodynia in untreated wild-type mice was the same.

Female mice, of course, still have microglia. On a hunch Sorge et al. went out
and bought some female mice with no T-cells. They
turned out to be using the microglia pathway just like the males. When they put
the T-cells back (using adoptive splenocyte transfer), they became insensitive to
minocycline again. This means that in females, the T-cells are adapting and taking
over the function of microglia. Fenofibrate, a drug that activates a protein called
PPARα (peroxisome proliferator activated receptor alpha), wiped out the
allodynia response in males, but not females. Conversely, a PPARγ agonist
(pioglitazone) wiped it out in females, but not in males. Expression of these
PPAR proteins in T-cells is sexually dimorphic, which means it's influenced by
testosterone. So there ya go. A reasonable explanation.

There's good reason to believe these results apply to you humans as well. Minocycline
penetrates the CNS more readily than other antibiotics like tetracycline. It
produces vestibular side effects that are much more common in women than in men [5].

This paper illustrates the beauty of science. A discovery starts when you look at
something a little different and an unexpected result happens. Finding out why the
numbers didn't come out right leads, if the pieces are in place, to the solution
of a previously unsolved mystery. Just remember: you couldn't have done it without
us mice.

You humans don't use female mice much in research, but it's not because you're sexist.
You use them, I'm told, because female mice are a b**** to work with because of their
estrous cycle. (Tell me about it.)
So it turns out that Tim Hunt was right about girls in the lab. But now, for brain
research, you have no choice but to use them, and to make them cry, or at least
squeak, some more.